SEO- How to improve your ranking

General tips to get a good ranking.

1. Create a good site with good content.
This is critical, especially as search engines grow in sophistication. If your site contains worthwhile material, users will return to your site and will recommend it to others. Other sites will link to you - which will in turn help you by improving your link popularity.

2. Pick keywords visitors will actually use on a search engine query.
If you have keywords that are very competitive, consider narrowing your focus to improve results. The keyword "horse" will return thousands of responses and may not place you near the top, while "Appaloosa" is more focused and targeted to a particular query.
Consider using a keyword phrase instead of just one keyword. Visitors to search engines use phrases to narrow their searches. For example, instead of using a keyword like "horse" that would return too many responses, use a more specific keyword phrase like "Alabama Quarter horse."
Brainstorm a good list of list of keywords. Tap into other people - a fresh perspective can help uncover words you may have missed. This keyword analysis article offers some useful tips on brainstorming.
Don't just guess at which keywords are popular, get quantitative feedback using the Keyword Popularity tool included in Search Engine Power Pack. Remember, if you pick the wrong keywords, all your optimization will be wasted. See story on Keyword Selection.

3. Include keywords in your TITLE tag.
Pages with keywords appearing in the TITLE are assumed to be more relevant to the topic than those without.

4. Use keywords in META Keyword and Description tags.
Using META tags will not hurt you in search engines that don't use them, and they can definitely help you in search engines that do index them. While they are not as important as the TITLE tag, META tags can give you the edge over your competition since most web sites don't even use them.

5. Use your keywords throughout your page.
Search engines will check to see if the keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

6. Have a good keyword density on your page.
Keyword density is derived by dividing the frequency of that word by the total words on the page. Frequency is a major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. This can turn into a balancing act as too high a density can be considered spam by some engines. Usually you are safe if your keyword density falls between 1 - 5 %.

7. Continually work on improving your link popularity.
Listings on popular Web sites can increase your traffic significantly. They do this in two ways:
They give potential visitors multiple paths to your Web site.
They can increase your ranking in search engines that use link popularity as part of their formula.
Most search engines use link popularity as relevance criteria. For example, the Google search engine (not their new directory) is based almost entirely on link popularity.

Source: http://www.netmechanic.com/powerpack/info/info1.htm#4

Web Design & Search Engine Optimization

How Can Web Design Affect Search Engine Optimization & Corresponding Rankings?
Directory editors will actually review your site and be critical of issues that you might not be.
Search engine spiders can't see what you and I see so they must rely on the specific algorithms set for them. Some of these algorithms are going to depend on design issues in your web site.
When directories or spiders become confused or slowed down because of design issues, your page becomes less relevant.

Your Web Design Should Meet Search Engine Optimization & Directory Criteria...
Browser Compatibility
Make sure that your design is compatible with all browsers 4.0 and above.

Comfort
Your web design should be comfortable, enjoyable and appealing to the human eye.

Fast Loading
Slow load time will defer a spider from your site -- not to mention your visitors.

Neatness Counts
Your pages and your site as a whole should be neat, clean and organized.

Images
Your images should be optimized for the smallest possible file size while keeping the quality of the image.

Logos
Your web site design should incorporate your company logo on every page of your web site.

Load Time
For best results, keep page load time below 12 seconds on a 56k modem.

HTML
Your HTML code should be clean and clear of any errors.

Web Design Considerations When Preparing For Search Engine Optimization...

Use Cascading Style Sheets
By using CSS, you are specifying certain factors such as font, color, paragraph style, etc. all in one place of your page instead of throughout your page. By doing this, you will make your content appear to be more prominent throughout your pages and will make it easier and quicker for a search engine spider to get through your pages. Keep in mind that all CSS is not compatible with the Netscape browser.

Things To Avoid When Preparing Your Web Design With Search Engine Optimization & Directories In Mind...

Splash Intro or Welcome Pages
Your home page will be the most important page of your site and should include quality content.

Completely Flash
DesignsA majority of major engines will not index flash sites. Editors may be critical of heavy or slow loading flash.

Flash Features
Flash requires a lot of resources, may cause slow load time and confuse spiders.

Pure Graphical Web Sites
Your web site must contain actual text. Spiders can not read text that appears within an image.
Frames
Most major engines can not read frames. If you must use frames, include important body text within a tag.

Animated Graphics
Slows load time and can be annoying to some visitors, editors and spiders.

Heavy graphics
Slows load time.

Low Quality Graphics
Editors and your visitors will be very critical of this.

SoundSlows
load time and can be annoying to visitors and editors.

Dynamic Features
Spiders can not crawl dynamic features such as drop down menu's and shopping carts that are dynamically generated.

Java Script
Spiders can't read JS and it gets in their way. Spiders can become confused by JS and it can make your important text appear to be less relevant. If you must use JS, move it to an external .js file.

Java Script Links
Spiders can not crawl links in Java Script.

Image Maps
Spiders can not crawl the links within image maps.

Spelling Errors
Directory editors and your visitors will be very critical of this.

Broken Links
Spiders and editors will be very critical of this. Check this regularly.

Pop-ups
They will slow load time, confuse spiders and annoy editors and visitors.

HTML Errors
Bad HTML will confuse spiders and cause browser compatibility issues.

When Preparing For High Search Engine Rankings, NEVER:
Submit an unfinished site.
Submit a site that includes words such as "Under Construction".
Include text on your home page that says something like "report broken links here". Include a phrase such as this on your contact page. Never on your home page.
Include illegal content within your site.
Use hidden text / links, tiny text / links, same color text / links as the background - this is considered spam and you can be banned from major engines and / or directories if you do this.
Use clear or transparent images.

Following the above tips will give your site one more added boost to increasing the accessibility of your pages for better indexing and ranking potential.

Source: http://www.internetmarketingwebsites.com/web-design-search-engine-optimization.htm

PPC search engine advertising

As it is sometimes difficult or almost impossible to achieve a top position in the search engines for certain keywords, one often ends up thinking "isn't there an easier way to do this?". Well, of course there is, but it isn't free.
If you don't want to hire a professional to optimize your site for you, you can always submit your site to a PPC search engine that sells the top positions instead of selecting them with a complex algorithm. Overture is a good example of a PPC (pay-per-click) engine and it might be the best of the bunch.
Their system is relatively simple: You select a keyword and decide how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results. The more money you can cough up, the higher you will rank on the result list. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on.

Making the most out of your money

The cost of the top position depends greatly upon the keyword you are bidding for. For example, the #1 ranking for "ecommerce" at Overture currently costs around $3 per click. At the same time, you could get the #1 position for "certified ecommerce consultant" for a mere 5 cents per click. The latter does not produce as much traffic as the former, but it is a whole lot cheaper. And if you have the time and energy to bid on a bunch of these low-traffic keywords, the combined traffic from them will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword - but at a fraction of the cost.
There are two additional benefits in bidding for the less popular terms. One, the traffic you will receive is targeted better and should result in a better clicks-per-sale rate. Two, Overture has many partners that display the top three results from Overture in their search results. It is hard to grab one of the top three places in popular keywords and still be able to make a profit, but with slightly less competitive keywords, you can get into the top three with a reasonable price and thus have your site displayed on all of the Overture partner sites as well. To find these keywords, I would recommend that you use Overture's own tool for finding keywords.
Does this mean that you should forget the keywords that already have some people bidding for them? Absolutely not. You should bid on every keyword relevant to your site, but at the same time, you have to make sure that you will be making a profit after paying for the traffic. I recommend that you start out slowly with Overture. Investigate how much an average visitor is worth to you and then bid accordingly; the key is not to get carried away. It is better to rank 38th, get a few visitors each day and make a small profit than to rank 1st, get masses of traffic and lose money! If you feel that you aren't getting enough traffic, try to correct the situation by bidding on more keywords, not by increasing your bids so much that you won't be able to turn a profit.

Don't pay any more than you have to

When dealing with Overture or any other PPC search engine, it is also important to remember that other bidders are constantly changing their bids. If you can devote the time, checking your listings once in a while and changing your bids to suit the current situation can save you a lot of money, especially if you are bidding for terms that get searched a lot.
For example, I often see situations where the top bid is $1.20 and the second highest bid is $0.75. The guy that is bidding $1.20 in such a situation must be loaded with money, since he could achieve the same ranking with a mere $0.76 per click. I know, 44 cents isn't a lot of money, but if dozens or even hundreds of people click on the listing each day, it adds up pretty fast.

There is a tool for monitoring these "bid gaps" between top positions, but unfortunately it only offers a very limited free trial and you have to pay to get full functionality. Still, if you're bidding on a massive amount of keywords and are short on time, the money spent on that tool might not go to waste. If you only bid on a limited amount of keywords or have time on your hands, you can monitor your rankings manually and save your money.

Also, remember that Overture has a minimum monthly spend of $20. If you purchase click-throughs for less than $20 on a given month, your account will be charged $20 for that month. Make sure that you're bidding on enough keywords to produce at least $20 in click-throughs per month in order to avoid paying for nothing.

My experiences with Overture have been mostly positive, and other people I've talked to seem to agree. The only negative thing about Overture is that they have become very popular among siteowners, causing the price for a top position in certain keywords to rise. Still, even at the current prices, they (in my opinion) beat the hell out of banner advertising.
However, Overture isn't the only PPC search engine out there. About.com's Sprinks, Searchhound, Ah-ha and FindWhat all offer similar PPC advertising programs. I have not used them so I cannot comment on their quality, but I'll be testing them in the coming months.


Source:http://www.apromotionguide.com/top_position.html

Search Engine Optimization Basics

Brainstorm

When you started your company or developed your products, you no doubt sat down with your friends, relatives and business partners and discussed the needs of your target audience. You would have been foolish to stubbornly press ahead with your products without first testing the market to see if there was a demand. Likewise, when you start out on your SEO campaign it is important to brainstorm search phrases that are likely to bring qualified visitors to your website. Sit down with your co-workers and business partners and discuss which keywords are relevant to the products and services you offer. Compile an initial list of 5-10 search phrases that you feel best represent your company and which you believe people would type into a search engine when trying to find you. Consider the following factors when brainstorming:

1. Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?

2. Which of your products are in stock? There is no point targeting search phrases that are popular if you don’t actually stock that item.

3. Which products have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.20 mark-up on a very popular product, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.

4. Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

Make use of any PPC data

Chances are, your decision to begin a SEO campaign is fueled by your desire to reduce costly pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While reliance on PPC will be reduced with a good SEO campaign, you can make use of your current PPC efforts when researching your search phrases to target. Analyze your PPC keywords and look to see which of them have brought the highest traffic levels, best click through rates and greater sales conversions. It is likely a search phrase that brought successful results through a PPC campaign will be very relevant in your quest to obtain top search engine positioning.

Expanding your Keyword list

Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it’s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will not, as I am sure you will know, bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, MSN et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are a couple of very useful tools you can use to expand your list.
The first and most well known, is the Overture Search Suggestion Tool. This great little research tool is primarily for the use of Overture PPC users and if you have ever endeavored on a PPC campaign with Overture, you will no doubt have come across it. Take any of your main search phrases and enter them into the suggestion tool. Overture will then spit out all other popular search terms that contain that phrase. In addition, Overture will place the search phrases in order of popularity and give you an idea of the number of searches per month for each phrase across their network.
While this tool can be very useful, especially as it is free to use, it does have some key drawbacks. First, it does not differentiate between singular and plural search phrases. Consequently, "desktop computer" and "desktop computers" are combined together, leaving you to use your own judgment as to which variation is the most popular. For many search phrases, you can take an educated guess as to which one is likely to be the most searched, but often you will be left without a clue as to whether to target the singular or plural. Secondly, the Overture Suggestion Tool does not handle punctuation very well, preferring to ignore it completely. Thus "kid’s toys", "kid’s toys", "kid- toys", "kid’s toy" would all be shown as "kid toy". Again, this never used to be a big problem, but go to Google and search for each of these phrases and you will see different results for each one.
If you are serious about your SEO campaign, you will consider a subscription to WordTracker to be a worthwhile investment. Starting at just $7 a day, with discounts all the way up to one year of service, WordTracker offers a similar type of research tool as Overture but with many more bells and whistles. The biggest advantage with WordTracker is that is uses Meta-Crawlers when sourcing search phrase frequencies. This eliminates inflated search phrase frequencies from Overture users checking their own rankings and thus artificially increasing the popularity of certain phrases.

Determining Competition

Once you have identified possible additions to your search phrase list, you must research further to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized top search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. While it can be tempting to target only search phrases that are very popular and searched hundreds of thousands of times in a single month, you must also consider the likelihood of you being able to obtain a ranking higher enough to capitalize on all of that great traffic. Many, many search terms are so saturated by competitors that it would be highly unlikely that you would achieve a high enough ranking to reward your efforts. Therefore, it is often worthwhile considering those search phrases that may not have quite the same level searches each month, but likewise do not have as many websites targeting that term.
WordTracker’s KEI (keyword effectiveness index) allows it’s users to analyze their chosen search phrases to determine the level of competition for that phrase. WordTracker has a great explanation on their website as to how to use this index, but in summary it provides a numerical scale for identifying the popularity of a keyword compared to the number of competitors targeting that phrase.
For those of you on a strict budget and opting to use Overture for keyword research, there is an alternative answer. Enter each identified search phrase at Google, using quotations around the phrase (e.g. "discount computers"). Google will then display the search results for all pages that target that phrase exactly as entered. View the top right, blue navigation bar and you will see the number of results Google matched. This number represents the total number of web pages that Google has identified as targeting that exact search phrase. This number represents your competition or your very own KEI. Make a note of this number for each of your identified search phrases and pretty soon you will be able to see which of your search phrases have the most competition and which have less competitors and therefore a better chance of obtaining top ranking.

Source:http://www.danex-exm.dk/andy.htm

SEO Analysis

The first step to receive more traffic from the search engines begins with a complete SEO analysis and site evaluation. A customized website review will reveal precisely the optimization required to give your site a top search engine position. All website SEO critique is professionally formatted and individualized to your website's HTML coding, page content, current positions, current traffic statistics, etc.

Complete keyword analysis.

Do complete keywords analysis to identify the best keyword phrases for your business taking into consideration the three most important factors:

1. What are the most relevant keyword phrases for this page in order of importance?
2. What is the popularity of each of these keyword phrases?
3. How much competition does each of these keyword phrases have?

Generate a comprehensive list of related keywords based on those used on the public search engines. We analyze search engine databases to determine key variations on those keywords and phrases. Searching of actually used keyword phrases (using Overture’s word suggestion tool) that are relevant to your business, we determine the best phrases to use to optimize your site.

Competitive analysis.

Carefully assess your online competitors’ sites, their strengths and weaknesses. We analyze the winners' sites to determine what it will take to build a site that wins for the target search. By looking at the winners, we help decide how to allocate your resources.

Complete site analysis.

1. Assess web site strengths and weaknesses: design, content organization, web site navigation.
2. Assess current keyword optimization of index page.
3. Analyze keywords density and individual weight of pages.
4. Scrutinize site's code to discover what changes need be made (if any).
5. Perform full link analysis for site popularity, number of total inbound links from other web sites, PageRank.

Statistic analysis.

1. Furnish stats of how site currently ranks in major search engines for targeted keywords/keyphrases.
2. Confirm indexing by search engines or not.
3. Confirm how many pages are actually indexed by major search engines.
4. Analyze traffic statistics.

Source: http://www.redgraphic.com/page.php?page=23&id=921

Graphics or Content?

Do you subscribe to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words--and therefore images, not a lot of text, should be the main thrust of your home page? Or do words have more power to capture a visitor's attention and compel them to buy - meaning you should aim for powerful copy?

As a web designer, the natural instinct is often to create graphically rich websites. Since the focus on what a site looks like visually, many designers like to use impressive images, bold splashes of color all over the page, and not very much copy. The end result is an attractive, visually appealing site, with very few words

However, we have learned that we have to balance this inclination with a cold hard reality: what appeals to us, as a designer is not necessarily the same as what visitors need.

The main problem with websites that don't have any copy is that they fail to quickly and effectively communicate the three points that all commercial websites must get across:

• 
  You must explain what your company does
• 
  what the benefits are of using your product or service
• 
  why prospective customers should purchase from you
• 
  These important pieces of information can only be conveyed vaguely, if at all, through images. While pictures are often very useful in reinforcing a message, it's difficult to succinctly drive home these important points solely through images.
  On your website, visitors want specifics, and they want them quickly. They want you to tell them exactly what you can do for them, and they want to know right now. You must specifically state what you do and explain how your product or service is going to make your customers' lives better. You have to spell out why people should buy from you versus your competitors.

Particularly on a home page, you must catch a visitor's attention and give them a reason to stay on your site. If you don't do this immediately, they are gone.

For this purpose, words are far more effective than images. In almost all cases, pictures cannot communicate the message nearly as specifically or quickly as well-chosen words can.
It's important to remember that the web revolves around information. People use the web to find out what they need to know, to be informed on topics that are important to them. That almost always means they are looking for text. They want explanations, answers, reasons, and motivation.

We firmly believe that pictures and images enhance a website, but they should be used to provide a tasteful, professional frame for your copy, not replace it.

It is true that web users are notorious for having short attention spans and not wanting to read large amounts of copy. The problem is that most of the copy on websites today is vague and not enticing. It's focused on the company rather than the customer. So it should be no surprise that visitors avoid reading it.

The solution does not lie in eliminating text-based communication; it means we have to work harder to capture interest with copy. People DO read copy that catches their attention.
If visitors are met with paragraphs that are focused on them, that are rich with benefits, and that are formatted in easy-to-read chunks, they are much more likely to be drawn in and to act on your offer.

http://www.a1technology.com/about.htm

http://www.a1technology.com/sitemap.htm

http://www.a1technology.com/software-outsourcing.htm

http://www.a1technology.com/web-designing.htm

http://www.a1technology.com/contact.htmcom

Source:http://www.ucsi.cc/webdesign/searchengine-content.html